Working Up SimCity Wealth

Dec 18, 2012

Chris Schmidt, Tuning Designer

Hello again everyone! Previously, I talked to you about how roads affect density and how you get a city started in SimCity, so today I want to talk about how to make your city grow in Wealth. Wealthy Sims bring with them high rises and skyscrapers, as well as needs that others Sims will hardly complain about. Despite having a lower population density, these Sims are more demanding, and much harder to keep around. In the end, wealthy Sims can be a boon to your city, providing significantly more income than other Sims if managed well, or a burden if you aren’t up to the task.

In SimCity, you’ll find attracting high wealth Sims to your town and growing in wealth is fairly easy, however as I mentioned, the challenge comes in keeping wealthy Sims and businesses in your city. While all RCI buildings have basic needs, like water, power, sewage, and garbage, higher wealth Sims are more sensitive when their needs aren’t met and will become more vocal and less happy the more you ignore their needs. Education, pollution reduction, better crime suppression, and consistency in all your services will become a priority as your Sims go up in wealth. Additionally each RCI category has a service that becomes more important the more of them you have. Industrial buildings are more prone to fires, commercial buildings are more sensitive to crimes, and residents will go home and stay there is they get sick, demanding more health services.

Based on what your focus is, you’ll want to make sure you have enough buildings to respond to their needs. Industrial cities will want to focus on fire and garbage services, commercial cities on police and transportation. Individual services can cover a fair amount of your City, but unlike the suppression radius of previous SimCity games, these units have to actually travel to the problem areas, so you need to keep your streets clear with public transportation (covered in detail in Lead Gameplay Scripter Guillaume’s past blog post) and make sure to expand your services to cover multiple fires, crimes, or injuries, particularly as these buildings grow in density.
As you place service and infrastructure buildings to meet your city’s needs, you will see the land value of your city begin to change for better or worse, and in turn you will see some of your residential and commercial buildings upgrade to reflect these changes. Industrial buildings are less particular about where they like to be, and instead grow in tech level by having college or University education in the city. High tech buildings provide less air pollution, higher profit margins, and less of a negative impact on the land value of the neighborhoods that are nearby (though don’t expect anyone to build mansions nearby).

Controlling your land value to attract specific wealth classes is an important part of managing your city, and while getting mid wealth residential and commercial buildings is a natural part of improving conditions in your city, getting more than a handful takes some sprucing up. Players who decide they want to take on the challenges of higher wealth will mostly impact the wealth of their neighborhoods by improving them with parks. Parks come in a wide variety of flavors in SimCity, but can be generally broken into three categories: Low Wealth, Mid Wealth, and High Wealth. Low Wealth parks provide some happiness to the local Sims, and a place for Sims and their kids to hang out and keep out of trouble. Mid Wealth parks attract mid wealth buildings, and are generally nature or sports themed. High Wealth parks tend to revolve around sculptures and fountains and other expensive but nice to look at elements, and will attract high wealth buildings. Building parks in a neighborhood will spur the development of buildings of that wealth class in a radius around them, and building them in areas with a high natural land value, or overlapping the influence of another park will widen this effect. On the other hand buildings that are noisy, dangerous, or heavy polluters will decrease the land value around them, so be careful where you place them.

I hope this gives you a better sense of how you can attract and keep wealthy Sims and businesses in SimCity. The diversity and challenge of playing the wealth game means spinning a lot of plates, but I think you’ll be happy with the results if you take on the challenge!

Comments

Anyway I can get approved for beta testing? I will pre order the Deluxe Limited Edition today if I can beta test. I have a Mac, PC, tech skills and have played every sim city to date. Please please please let me beta test!!!

Here is a link to the SimCity Reddit AMA, the link is uncensored and unedited by the SimCity marketing department.
It is very important to note that without being constantly online you will not be able to play the game. The worst kind of DRM.
You would think EA would have learn't from Blizzard's experience with Diablo 3, apparently not though.
Don't support aggressive DRM. Don't buy this game.http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/14umm1/we_are_the_simcity_dev_team...

I'm in that same boat :) Beta now, I pre order deluxue now :p
Also, I believe you guys have a typo.. "and residents will go home and stay there is they get sick," guessing you meant and stay there if they get sick? Is they get sick just doesn't seem right.

"and residents will go home and stay there is they get sick," sounds like it should have read "...and residents will go home and stay there as they get sick..." -- with disasters like earthquakes, illness can be caused by chemical contamination as well as viral and bacterial. The best way to clean your water is to simulate a weather cycle -- heat the water at 100 degrees until it becomes steam, and take the steam and condense it back into a liquid, leaving most other chemicals to evaporate or stay behind when they don't have the same boiling point as water; That's what's called 'distillation', and great for turning sea water into a clean water supply. (Are there sea-water distillation plants in this game?)

It's nice to know that the "service radius" of Police, Fire, Education, and Health services is gone away with. I always hated having to build up some four clinics to serve up even the smallest of cities (a farming town with a population of about 4000 doesn't need that many clinics)... Of course, education buildings were worse about their service radius...

Of course, what would be nice to know is just how city specialty and wealth factors actually work with each other... Obviously the casino city is going to attract a lot of tourism, and thus require lots of retail space, police, parks, and public transportation. This is going to play very differently than the person who builds up a tech city, which will obviously require more schools, various freight options, fire stations, and space for factories... All of which these two cities will wind up attracting very different kinds of sims to them...

I think you've hit one of the most attractive things about the new Simcity! I agree with you! The service radius seemed a bit artificial to me, like putting a seeing eye dog on a leash to do a job and it still wasn't allowed out of the yard. GREAT point BlackDragonAJ89.

Yes! i want to see more gameplay strategy videos because every time, i learn something new that I could use in the game! and ill probably need that a lot! I want to play the beta too, but on my mac... my pc is super slow and i'll have to change it soon and i would rather have it on my mac!

Something I didn't see in the post and wonder about is traffic. Does traffic congestion play when it comes to wealthy Sims in the down town area? So for example, does my wealthy Sim living on some ridge overlooking the town, need to have quick access to his skyscraper job, or will the game allow for the fact that no congestion near his home is fine and congestion he experiences when getting to work is overlooked.

Well, this is where I'd have to really pick and prod into the engine to see... Let alone you'd have to factor how far he is from work and if he's willing to walk to his job if it's less than 400 meters away...

Same here, no pre-order until I see instant access to beta as a perk. Also I joined the insider and signed up for the newsletter and so far I have seen no news letter and the insider is usually 2 week old news.

Hey Chris! how are you? first I would like to say that I'm big Brazilian fan of Sim City, so sorry my English. I LOVE SIM CITY! and I want to congratulate all the staff that are working with the game, it have been a amazing job so far! I always wanted to become a game developer, but instead I turned out to become a architect, hehe. Which still has the same philosophy of building things and creating.

I've been playing the game since Sim City 2000! So I think the most part of the fans are already grown up, and we don't want to see a kid game... I mean in the aesthetic and graphics part, what I see from the game that will be realized is that the aesthetic is more childish or something like a futuristic naive art, with colorful buildings and a lack of realistic textures and reflections on the buildings, I hope its because it is not a final software.
But me and all the older gamers of Sim City want to see a more graphic-realistic kind of game, more serious and real, something that make us feel and believe that we are truly playing as a God constructing and creating a city like in REAL WORLD. That would be awesome, and I'm sure it will gonna rock!
So I just ask to please to make the aesthetic part of game more REALISTIC and LESS "colorful-naive-lack of textures" and less "childish-modern-buildings". And please don't forget the fan palms in the Casino buildings as though as an option so we can garnish our cities roads with the touch of Hollywood's magic charm.

I hope you guys can read my opinion, and I'm crossing fingers to be selected to help the game development with the Beta version.

Farms?? What about Farms? Please tell me there will be Farms on this game. Sim City 4 did it much better than Sim City 3000 when it comes to farms. The density issue was a problem in Sim city 3000 for Agriculture. Sim City 4 had its own tile for Agriculture. so there were few issues if any. If it is in this game, can it be expanded more? For example fields, pasture, fruit farms, etc. I am from the Midwest, where farming is a way of life. Besides without farms there wouldn't be any food on the table for the Sims to eat. I havent seen any farms in the videos. Beside from that, this game looks awesome. Keep up the good work. Also is it possible to make grids easier for streets? just wondering if that is possible.

I wonder if it will effect your game-play if you have too many rich neighbor hoods and not enough poor or middle neighborhoods, if you know what i mean. Also I wonder what would happen if you put a rich neighborhood next to a poor one? I guess I'll find out if my beta registration gets approved or when I get the game. LOL :)

I have been a long time player of all Comity and still play IM City 4 rush our I pre ordered the deluxe version of SimCity and hoping to be added to the Bata test crew Cant white for the release very excited for the new version